Effects of Primed Speaker Knowledge on Speech Perception Open Access

Abstract

Human speech changes significantly depending on the context in which it is produced. Variation in speakers’ utterances is often systematic and stems from a variety of sources such as a speaker’s age, gender, regional origin, and individual identity. This variability is not discarded, but rather rapidly encoded and integrated with linguistic structure during spoken language processing. In two experiments, the present study examines the extent to which social cues about the speaker, such as speakers’ age, can shift the perception of the acoustic-phonetic features of speech (e.g., voice-onset time, VOT). Using vowel length as a proxy for speaking rate, the first experiment presented participants with either shortened or lengthened vowel lengths in VOT continua during a categorization task. Findings from the first experiment showed that categorization of speech sounds can be changed by altering the acoustic characteristics of the signal.

The second experiment investigated the extent to which knowledge of a speaker’s age can shift the perception of VOT. Listeners engaged in a task identical to that in Experiment 1 except that they were primed with visual information about the speaker’s age (a photograph of an old or young speaker). Results show different categorization performance as a function of age prime for tokens across continua differing in VOT. Listeners appeared to be tracking and encoding the distribution of features associated with a particular group of speakers rather than just inferring general characteristics of speech associated with that group of speakers. These findings demonstrate that priming listeners with knowledge of a speaker’s age can induce similar patterns to those seen when the speech signal is altered. Speech perception appears to entail both bottom-up and top-down processes such that listeners employ their knowledge of group-specific acoustic-phonetic features of speakers to adjust their perception of speech.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction .......................................................................................................................1

Methods

Experiment 1 

Participants......................................................................................................................12          

 Stimuli.............................................................................................................................13          

 Procedure.........................................................................................................................14

Experiment 2  

   Participants.....................................................................................................................17         

   Stimuli............................................................................................................................18           

Procedure........................................................................................................................18

Results and Discussion

           Experiment 1 .................................................................................................................14

           Experiment 2 .................................................................................................................18

General Discussion.....................................................................................................................20

References...................................................................................................................................32

Appendix A: Primes...................................................................................................................38

Figure 1: Proportion /b/ responses across all continua as a function of Vowel Length and VOT.................................................................................................................................39

Figure 2: Proportion /b/ responses across all continua as a function of Age and VOT.................................................................................................................................40

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Psychology
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, General
Keyword	Priming Vowel Length speaker Age VOT
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Lynne Nygaard, Emory University
Committee Members	Hillary Rodman , Emory University Donald Tuten , Emory University

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